To a boy, aged 16

I was reading your old blog posts, all the way from your Secondary Four days. It was a strange feeling that, peering into the consciousness of a boy so foreign, with woes and joys that appear to be from a different sphere, and yet so familiar, like the smell of bread on your skin, that I could not help but be overcome by a wrenching desire to be there at those moments in time. This you, who had not yet come into my life, I too want to protect from life’s vagaries.

It is as if I got know you all over again, maybe not you, but the clay that would become you. I watched intently as you were slowly and painfully molded into shape by life’s skillful (and cruel) hands. And how she betrayed you sometimes! She who gave you the ability of love gave you too much, and soon these excesses morphed into duty, guilt and a punishing conscience who picked fights at every turn. Great love, unchecked and unrequited, becomes monstrosity, a death-hungry Cerberus, day after day, gnawing down your bones and dignity.

I suppose it should disgust me, watching you sweat out your cold turkey, the bloodshot eyes, the puke, the pornos, the loser behavior, the desperate need for attention, the blood-thirsty vengeance, the insensitivity, the selfishness, the immaturity, the boy crying for validation the only way he knows how. You were a bastard perhaps, but as I journeyed with your past I couldn’t help but notice how beautifully you thanked people for going out with you, how passionately you organized class outings, how desperately you wanted friendships to last. Of course, you were disappointed again and again, and my heart sank each time rejection brought you closer to hell’s door, where the devil’s fires blaze anew.

I know how hard you fought it. This constant oscillation between hope and despair would stop, if only you could time life’s pendulum swing. Yet she is a saboteur, each time she sends you up the pedestal, each time she brings the weight crashing down on the return trajectory. But you never did gave up, and your cheeriness pains me, as some god, who knowing what will pass, must see the celebration before the Trojan horse.

I saw a Vincent, struggling, to paint his first work of art. Every time he sets his brush on the canvas, someone comes along and begs him for help with their own. He always obliges, believing that these seeds of good he sows would someday bloom into prescient flowers he will water colour. Yet as the months go by and no flowers come, he sits like the Beast guarding the last petal. Resentment tempts him deeper into misanthropy. He cuts off his ear, stops listening. He becomes a gargoyle, and embraces the grotesque. But all those who shudder are deceived. He is a Prince, and he waits, for that moment before the last petal falls.

Knowing this, what can my response be, other than love? You think I mock you, by frolicking with a persona you want to forget. But this curiousity is love. Love that is strengthened by the intense desire to know all, see all and from that knowledge be remade again to take new forms, as new crystals metamorphosed from old rocks. Love hard enough to bolster and yet tender enough to cajole, sooth and whisper. I love you because you are poetry; you in your nature will always play slave to the dictates of love, victim to emotion’s raging tempests, and servant to the noblest ideals. You are humanity that I cannot be, humanity that I cannot write, humanity that repels yet when I’m at my least conscious, reels me in.

I feel like I’m caught in a time bubble that floated, unwittingly, into this kaleidoscope of colours you call your past. No words travel, but the transparent walls vibrate with each upheaval, and I feel shaken, though cloistered still by time’s impossible barrier. Helplessly I call your name, willing that those eyes would find mine and be comforted, willing that you could be happy now, for tomorrow. I want to hug, reassure, but fate demands you make the pit stops. Oh if only one could know! If we only knew then that we were not alone in this struggle with a relentless world. If we only knew that this relentless search should one day find harbor at the bays of the present. If only we knew, we could have comfortably lay down, made peace with life, and better savoured the days till July 2005.

Where have you been these 17 years? And where was I?

Daddy

You came too soon, you came too soon.
On the back of a junk, too many of you.
Slavery in the folds of a dirt bag,
Masters of donkeys, opium and poo
Douche-bags, all of you.

And when the tide came in, you grew
Became a gavel, a Confucian tool
With your rear end playing peak-a-boo
Now I’m his disciple too
You were here before me,

Were you? I read you like a history book
Three whips to a page, that makes
Good flagellation a sport. Like those
Marathons and marathons and marathons.
Over kill, maybe it will too.

Will it too. Run me to the death
As longs it pleases you.
Gas-tank, slung over. Smoke me like
Pot, with a huff and a puff and achoo
I’ll do what you cannot do

Jump through these smoke rings, whoo
Trapeze on your words, somersault too,
A leg lift, fold over, and then the fall
A Cirque Du Soleil doll
I’m your darling, ring master

Ring me thrall. The scars are
your love, some trophy to polish,
Minutes of minutes of you,
It’s a scorecard, and guess what daddy?
I’ll place my bets on you

Always the financial mogul
With your stocks and your shares and
Everyday blues. I remember mummy
Sprawled like a starfish, teething a smile
Like some goody-two-shoes

Mummy’s a mule
Plodding on with a leaking vat of you
It gets lighter and lighter,
Her back straightens and straightens
While I lick the drips on her shoe.

But Daddy I grew and I grew,
My foot grew too big in your shoe
My age now starts with a two
With a zero behind, with a zero behind
I zeroed my memory of you.

Daddy you better love me too
Love my hand and my feet and my heel
Daddy daddy roll the wheel
The fleece on your head shows through
Daddy daddy daddy, I’ll make three bags full.

On learning your grades

Thistle funnel breath
A cellular anorexia,
Squelched like Boa-meat
Air betrays its own nature
To boast rotund.
And then the smooth slide
Or gallop, into the gut.

Pelunk.
Stirred like hot mash
Witches cauldron gurgling
Day old leftovers, hot air
Propelling bumper-car romance
With intestinal fervency
Appendages clasp accidents
Rolling them into balls.
Salivate. Mothball smells from
Baby socks. These don’t come
Off easily.

Singles pining for a
Similar constriction.
Sudden rising of bile plume.
Expanding air to invade every
Fleshy Hiroshima. Then the
Release. Snake skin
Peeling back for freedom
All shapes evaporate
To muster

This gush, this suffocation
This edifying upward drift
Of my bell-jar asphyxiation.

Shut up and Sit Down

How many times -
Did we crumble under the divinity
of a wagging finger crossed
twice, as if creation got found out and
now sheepishly sought,
the forgiving (and forgiven) innocence
of a schoolboy’s childish folly.

How many times –
Did we smile as he hid behind skirts
and issues, attributing this bashfulness
to a virginal pathos, one that we in
Reason’s gloomy subterfuge
should cradle as first bud in spring or
last dash of snow. So he is
nursed, o infant joy, blessed
by our cowardice to compound
Eternity in never-land.

How many times –
Did the rod of invention strike foul to spare
this Happy child? No love runs
Thick as his tears, no music sings
Sweet as his tantrums. To his moods
we cling, bouldering the precipice
though blisters fester
And primordial veins, traitors to their inheritance,
scream sermons pleading
That we let go.

How many more times -
Will we turn the other cheek, so old wounds
don’t bruise? Like ostriches we place
our heads in holes, not, to escape
Death, but to silence out
the screeching decibel of fear.
What have we nursed in this rock-a-bye
but a dormant wind, now gentle in its caress,
but when next it blows,
upturns the cradle?

Intellectual Conversations

We began in autarky,
Two outliers deviating from the crowded mean,
too far flung to enjoy Pareto, fettered
within the boundaries, of our own sub-optimal
Consumption.

The invisible hand gestured,
Beneath the veil of ignorance
Worn diaphanous by desperation, two egos rode the
Utility function. Epicurean delight moralised,
Into a grand equilibrium.

So said Pandora: ‘Ceteris paribus, we are better off.’

The hand made visible feels warm,
Rubbery, like leather from the backs of some endangered species,
An ignoramous? But then, you always were
Unashamedly bipolar, while my likert scale
purports a proclivity to moderate.

I am your muse, you say, as if Paris
Ever bled poetry in his death. Much more a siren,
Greasing your odyssey with ambrosia wails
Till your ears grow lesions, and henceforth no music from my mouth
Harmonises yours.

It is a competition, and we run each other down.

Yet the enemy doesn’t always sits across the table,
Xenophobia is shared, like a couple lunch.
Outsiders taunt laughs, and sub-lunary microcosms clear
The throat, though always with a bitter aftertaste,
Maybe we never really left Nash.

Maybe we are our own Darwin, predicating our own humanity
On some stupid Galapagos birds squawking – why
I am not waiting for Godot. Why we, yak about
Paradise lost with Miltonic heroism, why we persistently ignore
The irony behind a theist and atheist.

Why why? Exactly how we undermine ourselves.

How we talk, and sip on gasified water,
Pauses interspersed by words, or is it the other way?
Semantics stifling silence. I like this democracy,
rhetoric riots better than any Lynch mob, even
in a rambunctious bull run.

Still, we are doubly exposed, through this
small aperture we print as bold italics, underscored
Struck through. Since when,
did we start to auto-focus, zooming in as fast as we zoom out,
Quid Pro Quo?

You tell me transition matters, I can’t figure out the beginning from the end.

A smile lingers in the places our minds wander,
We shriek like children in a game of tag,
I catch you mid-sentence;
You catch me when I fall,
Down the slippery slope of love.

The last Cordelia

'O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

-La Belle Dame Sans Merci
John Keats

__________________________________

What can ail thee,
But a smattering of self, broken
reflections in age-worn mirrors
Too old to back-date.

On which you weep elegy,
Scrawling lines of woe etched,
Of who where when,
sometime or
Other, life trampled hard enough,
though not nearly.

Is it man who breathes, yet
With each gasp, manacles one’s throat
To stifle breath? Is it man who drinks,
Yet with each gurgle, envision death?

Is it man who lives, yet
With each moment spoil,
the steady beats to which life pulsates?

Is it man who loves, yet
With each moment deny,
This gentle loving gently wake?

Lave, lave the suffixes
of full Abandon! The man drowning in sand,
will at his last soliloquy take
some living weed, to make lavish
His sepulcher.

This is your Dionysian joy.

For which you live,
For which you, will I destroy.

No man's land.

Amazing how in the grand scheme of things,
between the mad-rush and voting boxes,
You stand dictator,
as ailing Democracy is vetoed,
and majority loses its last war.

This is no time for mavericks,
Bombs tick your ambition
while all other dreams
Detonate.

Seemingly self-defeating
Seemingly triumphant
Stoically non-partisan

You slash the jugular –
Knife curved like a smile.

Soon there will be three bags full.

The Memory Refrain

The place hasn’t changed;
The dusty tiles bear the colour
Of paint, splattered, across days months years-
Layer upon layer, tile upon tile
Of memory coagulated onto a knowing canvas.

The change is mine.

I smell sawdust, long settled into cracks.
I hear the grating drill, plunge into
Pliable wood; incessantly, persistently,
Stubbornly. For at the very last note
It all ends. Or will end.

Or ended.

I go to our haunts, now haunting,
Like ghosts ill-revenged, wailing
For a second turn.
I trail the corners, shy of light,
Like children demurred, crying
For a toy returned.

I don’t remember why we sang
Like crazed lunatics; seesawing
Ungainly shoulders to a tune.
I still remember why we fanged,
Like taskmasters, gainsaying
Innocent laughter far too soon.

I must look stupid, remembering so much
And yet too little. The mind records
What the heart scoffs,
And now, the tiles rebuff
And mock
this Delightful Loss.

Lotus Song (inspiration from 12 lotus, royston tan)

Prologue
How pitiful you are dear lotus,
Cast into the murky soil.
The wind murmurs your name now-
Dear girl, will you sing?

(i)
Dust falls low in Sana’a
Lightly brushing the smells of porridge
That wend its way through every household.
We sit by the well, all *baltho - waifs
chewing hallucination under a veil.
Ah, the pleasure of being unseen!
-from fingers, hand, and the occasional foot.
In this shrouding sarcophagus
the world unravels its whole brilliance.
Identities fade, our bodies strain, come loose,
deconstructing into the most basic algorithm
Allah used when he lovingly moulded humankind.
Unspeakable joy-
Soon our man will return
And we will bloom like prescient flowers,
My sisters and I, as we scurry
To gather buds that wither down below.


(ii)
We had not met-
As custom went, but fortune, face, and family
Had gone ahead of us to make their loves;
Ours they sealed in dowry.
Hand henna-bound, forehead etched red.
The mark burned, though less,
Than the husband’s searing glance
As he pledged to worship the ground
That I walked on – his part is easy,
For that pledge I walk these steps-
How quickly does sari turn to ash?
Flesh to dust, bone to fine sand?
Till death do we part? Never.
Not even so. I breathe,
A short breath-
Before I take my place beside him, in his pyre.


(iii)
To him whom I have loved before-
Write me no letters;
I wish you death, quick and easy
Let a bullet stop your gentle heart
and make no mark upon your face.
So many men have kissed the dirt, mouths agape
In this roughly hewn piece of hell;
But let no penance singe your beloved face,
Or tear the laughter from your brow.
May youth dance its graceful Art,
Upon your lips, and go you to some greater sphere,
Heights my flights of sorrow cannot scale.
I only pray – that some strains of music
Ease down below, not to pleasure me
But to know you are now in joy,
And not the dank trench where good men sweat
tears, fester, and bring on
This bitter wasting of a woman’s years.


Epilogue
Out of the muddy water,
She stands like a queen above the murk,
And nature gifts its purest perfume,
And light bequeaths its finest livery,

And love sings its most piteous song.



*black robes that women in the Yemen wear

Cinematic Magic - Thoughts from NTU Cinema studies

It is quiet here,
like all other human senses,
our curiosity stretches
Out, like a cat
trying, too hard, to claw
at the fringes of existence.

Nary a mew-

For what is reality but what we can
tease cajole and coax, belly up
into purring obeisance?

Life is what i record-
with my eyes, ears, mouth, heart,
Places you have touched, lingered
and forgotten,
in a time too long past for antiquity.

Life is what you interpret-
At once high fantasy touches your shores,
At once I am archaic in its backwash.

The Clown.

And then there were none.

The first to go was the recalcitrant youth. Adventure was his element and even the infinite waters of the sea could not contain his thirst for rarer shores. In no harbour did he find anchor, his gaze perpetually cast upon the next wave. He lived on the edge of oblivion and more often then not, taunted existence to throw him out. But just like the way moths take to flame and death, I punished myself in his inferno, and the pilgrim sang Prometheus’s song.

Second in line was the insignificant man-of-the-street, with his bowler hat of insecurities and pockets full of justified paranoia. His life was an oxymoron, his past, present and future showed the same reflection in the mirror. Between being and un-being he trod on a precipice. He was the man in the office, the man in the flat, the man at the voting box, the man hiding behind Big Brother. His end was exactly like his entrance, no one saw him go, no one saw him coming. No one saw him except me, and I quickly ushered him into death before life blacked him out.

Then there was the politician. He swept me off my feet with argument, and made all of life’s grievances sensible. I joined his campaign, and held his banner high. Together we marched down the long steps of our ivory tower and into the legions of Diaspora. We marched as comrades until the riot police came and vanquished our souls with tear gas and legislation.

Fourth was the prisoner, who held me thrall with his predicament. With him I felt the first stirrings of motherhood, and so I learnt that to be female was to be vulnerable to the weaknesses of men. Many were the nights where I cleaned the grime from his fingernails and soothed him to sleep in the godforsaken cell. Moonlight was only our company, and each other’s breathing our sole distraction. When he grew stronger, he broke the bars of his entrapment and walked free, and grief took me as his form joined the darkness and slipped away.

The fifth and dearest was the lover, the man who came to me in the night and made me belong. His words stoked fires, and all of life was ablaze in his presence. I bathed in his light and power, and felt eternity within grasp. But arrogance took him, and he was finally consumed by his own radiance, leaving me to weep Daedalus’ tears.

I knew them, if only like how each blind man knew the elephant. If only like how we all know and believe in the mysterious Mr Quinn.

The man who stands before me now is familiar, but stranger this familiarity makes him than strangeness. I trace the tousled criss-cross edges of his hair, inching my finger between the rough curls before lowering slowly to the face. Down my finger skims, leaving a faint line across the thickened brows and painted nose, to the obscenity of the plum red lips that instinctively tease themselves into a pout. I rub the soft flesh of my palm against those lips, feeling the colour rub off onto my skin, soaking in, initiating recognition. The contact singes my nerves, but I push on as the lips start to surface an earthly brown.

The face cracks, and peels, into a warm grin.

Dear god, I know you.

Look down, look down.

I read my old posts and hmm. Ji Ching is sick of being pretentiously intellectual. No more theasaurus.com. My old posts make me feel like an aspiring Adrian Mole.

This is my new resolution. To be uncut, uncensored, but not RA.

Bottled

Asphyxiate this emptiness
And it will be a tight squeeze
As the ball of gall gets rolling
Clinking,
Clank

Clunk.

Into the brains that were,
Taste the ambrosia of full-bodied
Amnesia. It is difficult,
To ponder, or stow-away

This endless rolling
On sharp ends.
Thud. On. Thud.

I remember the times when life was water,
Weaving in between set strands
Melodic like a fine tuned guitar,
Energy stored,
and then flow.

But the present make heartless
Grind. A drawn out sulk
Gives more comfort
Than this merciless banging
On sharpened nerves.

I need a break from rest.

Ji Ching lives.

For all those who think otherwise, I'm still alive. Just older, richer and a lot dumber.

They say wisdom comes with age, but in my case wisdom is long overdue. Poetry now only exists as an old friend, one of those you lose contact with as wealth, fame and other such social goodies get in your way. Not that poetry = wisdom of course, indeed the wise usually keep their words to themselves instead of blabbering them out in stanzas. But what i sorely miss is the presence of language as friend and companion, something to tide me through my most misanthropic moments. Perhaps wisdom did come after all, it came upon the wings of cynicism and crude rationality, wisdom in the context of our world of concrete and tarmac, not the labyrinth of passions and pathos that reside within art's chrysalis.

HAHA. There i go again. The self proclaimed cynic. NO MORE.

I'm so tired of waiting (and not wanting) A level results to come. I'm also so tired of sitting around in my office stool with either too many or practically nothing to do. I'm also tired of looking at pretty girls (Why the hell am I looking at pretty girls!) and trying to figure out which part of my genetic makeup went wrong. I'm so tired of turning my eye outwards towards the external world. All my life i've been jealous of something or someone. academically, emotionally, physically, it makes life very very difficult as everything morphs into distractions and I find myself floundering in waters only I can rescue myself from.

Which is most probably a good thing.

My uncle recently gave me a book written by this Australian monk who used to be a theoretical physicist. (Somehow people who take physics always end up believing in some higher power. Only something truly divine can create a world where the laws of nature (and physics) work so perfectly. ) The book contained stories that he collected when he was training as a forest monk (I know that sounds funny, but don't laugh, it's hardly polite.) There was one story that could probably apply to this situation.

I shall be concise. It told of how he once had to build a wall for this shelter they were constructing. He had to make it brick by brick, and every brick had to be aligned properly, in line and not tilting to one side for it to be a 'good wall.' And so he plodded on, meticulously labouring until at the last the final brick was laid. However, as he drew back to admire his work he noticed to his dismay that there were two bricks at the side that were grossly out of line with the rest of the wall. He knew that he had ruined the wall and even asked the abbot to let him destroy it and start all over again. However, there wasn't time, and so he had to let it be. From then on he tried his best to avoid the wall when taking visitors around the building, the two 'bad bricks' were so firmly embedded into his consciousness. However, something changed his feelings about the wall one day when a passing visitor saw it and commented, 'That's a nice wall you have here.' He looked at the visitor in surprise, pointing to the two misaligned bricks at the corner of the wall. The visitor smiled and said, 'But there are so many other good bricks here!' It was then that the monk realised that the two bad bricks were only minor factors that did not stop the wall from being a 'nice wall.' That was when he started noticing the 'good bricks' and the wall became an emblem of pride instead of a thing of shame.

When i first read it my first reaction was 'What a stupid monk. How silly it is to fret over a wall, much less two bad bricks!' But then i realised that i've been fretting over even sillier things all my life, from the number of people who talk to me over msn to grades to the measurements of that girl's hips/waist/thigh. Life has been a smogasbond of silly and time consuming jealousies. How much time I've spent on those two bad bricks!And to think that the monk actually wanted to destroy the wall of so many good bricks just because of those two bricks. I wonder how much of my happiness has been destroyed fretting about such irrelevant things!

Actually i'm quite happy about how my extended holiday has turned out. Not only do I now have a reasonable source of income, but I'm still able to do the stuff I like, such as getting involved in a production, shopping, reading cheap classics bought from the bookstore near my work place, going back to huang cheng, joking around with my family, spending time with that special someone, catching up with old friends, and even having the opportunity to pick up my pen once in a while. I stand in wonder of how i failed to realise it all earlier. Most of these are things that i always had, but never appreciated, and thus never enjoyed. They were there all along, patiently waiting for me to stop chasing after someone else's footsteps, waiting for me to be content.

What can I say? Thanks for waiting. (:



*ADVERTISMENT* (the box office is one of those things that are never content.)

For Huayi festival, the etceteras are putting up a play about this couple of ten years who decide to play a game (and hence its title) which allows each partner to get involved in an affair with a third party, though sexual activity is out of the bargain. Its on this friday and saturday at esplanade theatre studio. For more details check the link below!

http://www.huayifestival.com/game_play.html

Its pricey, but I think the way the actors interact with the set would be something to watch. And yes, I know its really really late notice, but procrastination's my bad brick! haha.

Anyway, having bored my pants off at work I decided to do something even less productive and came up with an unofficial synopsis for the play. It's my office computer's fault that it is not in chinese. It is even more potato than I am. Here goes.


Life is like a roll of the dice.

You have to take turns, and you need to come up with a stake.

You might win, you might lose, all in all, the minimum goal is to recoup your losses, but that would mean ending up at the same point, which is a hideous waste of time and everyone knows time is precious.

But whatever it is, giving always comes before taking, you always need to wager something of your own first before you can start to deprive other people.

It boils down to a question of either or. Either you trade sorrows with yourself or you trade sorrows with the person who sits right across.

Gameplay is a roll of the matrimonial dice. But they should be lucky. Ten years of dice rolling gives great probabilities.

Of course, this is purely an adult’s game. Children own nothing, thus take nothing, and then what’s the point?

Only adults have enough to lose.

Only adults have the power to possess.

Tragedy seeks them out.

The uncomplaining bound,
The dust fine-ground,
Stone-for-a-statue waveworn pebble-round.

blockage cleared

Liberation liberation liberation!

haha. not that my elation's really justified, since I've hardly been what (considering hwa chong standards, ok no, considering ANY standard) one might consider 'hardworking'. So erm yeah! So happy to be erh....EVEN MORE SLACK THAN USUAL. :)

(mailto:%&@#*$*(#&$(#$^&$. Forgive me while i try to get the fact that prelims are like around 6 weeks away outta my head. )

Anyway, back to the point of feeling happy. Now i can watch the world cup in peace! yay. Though actually i think my new found interest in the game is more because i don't want to mug rather than because of actual interest in the game itself. But in a way i am happy i got distracted, since that means that i can blame whatever shitty grades I get on the world cup. (A world event! FAR FAR more important than blocks!)

Funnily though, every team I support immediately gets kicked out of the game. First it was Argentina, then Ukraine (shevchenko!), EVEN BRAZIL (kaka!). -_- Maybe some sort of sadistic girly instinct is trying to put me off the sport. (What are you doing staying up late for soccer! You could be midnight shopping at suntec!) But yeah, blocks are over so soccer may prove to be boring again. Not that my interest is really authentic anyway, its a fickle on-off sort of thing, heavily dependent on mood, other leisure alternatives, and whether the team has enough players worth watching for factors other than their fancy footwork. HMM.

Lep was horrendous. I was so embarrassed during the paper because the teacher startled me THREE TIMES, making me jump in my seat and resulting in offensively loud banging noises caused by my knee hitting the table. All that spasming left me in cold sweat more than the fact that the paper was the most anal piece of examination i had ever taken. Reservist and a sunshine overdose make people cruel.

Huang cheng meeting tommorow. (: They seem so much less ominous now that huang cheng is over. haha. Good luck juniors. You have many seemingly insurmountable obstacles in front of you, and some are, but eventually even skinning your knees become a sort of pleasure. Approach us with caution! We might either be bandaid or salt. But not to worry! You'll recover, your skin will thicken, and you'll bear your wounds with pride! (to the extent of overindulging in them sometimes. haha.)

- I apologise for putting it in such an icky biological way. Pardon my lack of more aesthetic analogies. -

But yeah, all problems resolve themselves! It might seem like crap at the start, crap in the middle and crap at the end, just that at the end the crap is in the very fact that it has to end! Beneath this seemingly masochistic human behaviour there is a value in the huang cheng experience that only you and your batch will slowly define and understand. (since every batch takes something unique out of huang cheng) So just believe in yourselves and your batchmates!

haha.

Actually I also don't know why i am suddenly saying all this. Maybe it's because I remembered the fear and apprehension when I just got appointed. Its not so much the real difficulty of the work itself as is the sense of bewilderedness at the sheer perceived impossibility of the task. But I guess once you get past the fear and get to the work everything seems to become much more manageable. Sure, there will be hiccups along the way, but really, as long as everyone's moving in the right direction why worry about veering off course? I must say I enjoyed the journey. Its almost like a bullock cart ride, every bump just made us cling together tighter, every bump just made the whole experience more worthy of recollection.

(S)upreme (A)dministration (F)ailure.

Early in the morning, i put breakfast at your table 一夜都没睡但我　不曾如此清醒 我早餐准备了你　爱吃的东西 这次换我等你被咖啡　的香味叫醒 想要找回每天早晨　对我微笑著的你 还能够　做些什麼代替我的歉意 总是望著我　小心翼翼顺著我呼吸 而我竟然理所当然　让你精疲力尽 You were my superwoman 安静的在身边　无条件给我　梦寐以求的温柔 but i am only human 我怎麼不懂你多寂寞 残忍的犯了错 不能失去你 ooh—babe--- You fought your way through the rush hour try to make it home just for me 月光下静静靠著彼此　只求夜长一点 有多久没有好好看你　只是认定了我 无论在什麼时候回头　都有你的笑容 是我忽略了你也会有　想要哭的感觉 没有一种付出应该永远心甘情愿 再给被宠坏的男人最後一次机会 换我忍耐换我等待　不要真的弃权 (---baby)是我把爱想得太简单 以为只要我存在就能让你取暖 心裏唯一的superwoman没有人能代替 不能想像更不能原谅这样让爱化成　灰烬


I want to be a superwoman, 让你无论在什麼时候回头，都有会我的笑容。
But I am only human, and I can’t help letting the tears fall, just as I try to stop yours.

Alone.

I wish brazil would score. (Shit. Just as I was typing this, they did. Talk about lousy timing.)

You would probably have watched this with me, if you hadn’t had to wake up at the ungodly hour of 6am tomorrow. I don’t know why I’m staying up late alone to watch men kicking a stupid ball. I don’t even LIKE watching football as an alternative to advertisements most of the time. But I guess watching it reminds me of the times you were there at the other end of the line, giving your expert commentary using terms I only pretend to understand. The exhilaration we get at every goal - your exhilaration as a fan, and my exhilaration as your mood gets progressively better, indicating a nice goodbye at the end of the day.

I wish you were here to explain why Australia makes more shots on goal than Brazil, what kind of game tactic each side was using. Never mind that I wouldn’t have understood half of it, or that your explanation would probably have been interrupted by times when the game picks up speed. I don’t understand soccer, not without you. But it’s become almost a habit, I can’t sleep before two, and I still wait, almost as if you’ll call this time as usual to bet on the score line, and to laugh at this pseudo-soccer fan.

I am grateful for the world cup. Watching this match has been a comfort, somewhat. Perhaps it’s just because I’m too good at deluding myself. Perhaps it’s because the football field is a vat containing too many good memories of quiet and not too quiet nights of soccer indulgence. Even pretend indulgence. However far away, your presence lingers on in the noise and excitement that is football, noise that fills the unbearable silence which comes after my half-hearted cheers give no echo.

Final score: Brazil –Australia 2-0.

You missed a good game.
So did I.

Playground

Love is so fatalistic, the familiar ‘I would DIE without you’ proves that.

How everything goes into the hyperbole just because. The logic of love is like the way the narcotics bureau nabs ‘offenders’. ‘Want a drug? No? You sure? YOU SURE? I know you want it!’ *stuffs packet of ecstasy into person’s hands**flashes CNB id* ‘We’ve caught you red handed! Hee hee hee.’ It sounds just like, ‘Look at that girl! She’s pretty right? Hot right? You think she’s pretty right? You were ogling at her right!’ *burst into tears* ‘You ALWAYS look at other girls!’

It’s almost like going fishing using but yourself as a bait. The logic is so horribly warped it would look ridiculous anywhere but in the context of love. I guess a relationship is a safety bubble where seemingly normal people can do crazy things just because. Its like a playground for a society too long immersed in decorum and etiquette. No wonder hwa chong is called a love nest; too many Monday morning assemblies have resulted in a repressed student body begging for release.

I guess there won’t ever be a happy medium. But why are mediums happy anyway? Why does simplicity have to be bliss? Simplicity would only reduce life’s range of experiences. A whitewashing of life’s canvas to cover up flaws in artistry. But I find that I am as partial to sorrow as to joy, as reverent to folly as to virtue. Perhaps it is only in extremities do we find the vein that life throbs in, strong rhythmic pulses unyielding in their anguish and pathos.

Oh well. Just because!